Welcome to this episode of Unraveling Adoption, an intentional space to delve into adoption's complexities together. I'm Beth Syverson. I'm an adoptive mom of a vibrant, insightful 20-year-old son, Joey, who is struggling to find his path. I'm walking beside him while working on my own personal growth and healing. I'm
also a certified coach helping primarily adoptive parents. Joey and I are committed to helping anyone impacted by adoption, and we want to help the general public understand adoption's complexities better too. So, are you an adoptee who can't seem to make sense of the pain from your adoption? Or do you love an adoptee who's struggling like that? Or are you seeking more clarity in your inner world? In today's episode, we'll be talking about this big
picture of adoption's impact on adoptees throughout their lives. We'll be exploring the inner landscape that can shape an adoptee's life. Today's guest is Steve Rowley, a school administrator and college professor who went back to school in his 60s to become a psychotherapist. He leans heavily on Jungian and Zen concepts to help his own life make sense and to help others in his practice. His fascinating memoir, which I just finished and highly recommend, is called The Lost Coin,
A Memoir of Adoption and Destiny. Well, Yeah, very good. And we're both from Iowa, so we have that in common. Yes, we are. Yeah, you're from a much smaller town than me. I was from big city Well, Burlington was medium-sized at the time I was growing up, Important, yeah. It was an important city back in the day, I'm sure. Well, and there's a certain way to grow up being in Iowa. I always say, I'm Yeah, yeah. Well, first, there's
several aspects of your story I want to dig into. But first, I wonder if you can explain the title of your book, The Lost Coin. I understand it Well, as it turned out, as I was writing, which I was in the middle of exactly two years ago, when I got close to the end, I kept stumbling over how I was going to end it. So I needed to come up with some firm resolution, some big conclusion. But since I've been studying cones, I had one on my computer. A cone is like a puzzle, although it's
not. Okay. It's not something to solve, but it is something that in certain Buddhist lineages are used to help train the mind to become aware of the mind. Okay. So this one, a coin lost in the river is found in the river. Now in those becoming a priest process, you might have that for a month. Okay. And you get one a month for two years. So they don't take it lightly, but what it does is it helps the person doing it become aware of how your
mind's working, how it wants to do one thing when it really needs to do another. For example, trying to come to a conclusion when in fact The more I worked on it, let it work on me, that I realized I don't need to come to some firm conclusion. In fact, there's so much mystery that I still can't account for, which actually, not only in my life, but I think the nature of life itself, of fate, of how circumstances come together that somehow don't make sense, but yet they
do. So eliciting that sense of mystery to A coin lost in the river is found in the river. So if you think about it, You drop a coin in a stream, for example, and you think, well, it's right where I dropped it. I'll just, if we've ever been in a swimming pool, you drop something, it's not where you think it is anyway. And what happens if the water is muddy? Well, you don't know where anything is, and that's true of life too. We're also in
parts where we don't know where we are or what we're doing. So that to me had a very, a befuddlement, if you will, in terms of how are we supposed to understand things if things are always a mystery? But I think that's where we shift out of rational mind and shift into intuitive mind. And so they kind of, quote, lost coin. Was I lost in this world because of my adoption? Did I, quote, find myself eventually? Yes and no. I mean, sometimes the more we know, the more we realize how much we
don't know. So in terms of my life and my story, yeah, I came in much greater closure. But I say in the end of the book, I still don't know why I was so lucky. I was inordinately lucky to find my birth mother. when I was 40 years old, and it was a lot of hard work to do that. The meeting itself, which is the center part of the book, Mother and Child Reunion, talks about these moments of a couple hours with her, where there's almost this transmission. It
is almost like a Buddhist sort of form of transmission. The deep understanding of her and her of me, also my dialing in the fact that she had been in search for me as much as I had her, but she didn't have the resources. But that longing to connect was as much with her as it was for me. So that moment when we first realized that, where I could feel her mind, feel her sense of humor, and ditto her with me, then it was like, oh, that was the reason to come. And her
life otherwise was a pretty big mess. But we were past all that. So the sense of that connection we'd yearned for for four years finally came to be. And when I left, I never saw her again. And I don't think we had expectation that we would necessarily be in each other's lives. in a very active way. She had too many other problems she was dealing with than it was. But it was enough. It
Wow. That sounds so intense. Like if you were 18 when that had happened, you would have handled that a much different way than after all That's a great question, because what if I was just out of college or whatever? What would have happened? I mean, if I had that knowledge, I mean, I could have really messed up some lives. They were in a much different place in their own personal lives. So the timing was so right to wait that long. Yeah. Even though
I was eager for it to happen, but it was just in time to meet her. So, yeah, it would have been a disaster, I think, for both of them had I showed up. Yeah. Interesting. Fascinating. Now, it was interesting to read your book because you think it's going a certain direction several different times. You think, okay, okay, we're going this direction. You know, you're training to become a principal and an administrator and
superintendent and all these things. And you think it's going a certain way and then boom, it turns a corner. And you were surprised too, I'm sure. And more than the reader. So you got to kind of the pinnacle of your career. You had a superintendent job and it seemed everything was going great. And then inexplicably and mysteriously, you got fired from that job. I don't know if Well, I do. I mean, it's a long story, even longer
than the course in the book. I probably should have seen it coming and I don't think I wanted to. It was a huge dispute with members of the school board they had, them meeting illegally outside. Basically, There's a racial element to it that we're talking about, a contingent of Asian Americans. But the deal centered around something that the board president did, not me. So he wanted to both get me, but it also turned out that the community got him soon after all this happened. But by then, It
was a lawsuit. It was in waiting for mediation for six or seven months. So I had an imposed timeout for a long time. And during that time, I wasn't getting anything. That was part of the reason for the suit was because they violated my contract. So it was a difficult time. Fortunately, my wife was working. We had just enough money to scrape by until I did finally get a job. So it was imposed timeout, as
the phrase goes, with the dark night of the soul. I mean, I really felt I You'd think somebody going into psychotherapy would have found one, but I didn't for two years. I was too stubborn, I guess. But it was indecent what they did to me. And yet, even when the rest of the board conducted a fact-finding, the guilty members redacted all the stuff that spilled the
The whole thing sounded really terrible, terrible, terrible. And how disorienting that must have been, you know, at your peak of your career and You thought you had your life all organized in a certain way and then everything just gets turned upside down. And I'm sure it was not always pretty, but you took some time and then you regrouped yourself and you've since found a
lot of insights about that point in life. And I have to believe that your adoption and your relinquishment must have played into how that firing felt for Oh, yeah. The general broad brushstroke is a feeling of being abandoned. Sure. I was cast out. I had a large administrative team, most of whom I'd hired, about 60 people. I only saw one. To And the woman who I mentioned, who was my assistant, who took my place eventually, permanently, who I felt was very loyal, I think under orders from
attorneys, but it was just absolutely being cut off. So that was rude to say the least. But on the other hand, looking back, there was something necessary for me to go through this. As the book also describes, during this time, however dark it may have been, in better part, but I had enormous spiritual connections with the Dalai Lama Foundation, who's considered a co-founder. At some point, I mean, I wasn't the founder, but
I was among a small group. Numerous activities with him, and including the one I talk about in the book, relatively small private audience in Pasadena with Sharon Stone being there. That's But all these other things happened. I'm playing golf with a Tibetan Lama. Another thing being an art opening at UCLA with Geshe Gelsen and Sharon Stone again. These were monumental experiences because the
dream I had from the Dalai Lama seemed so subtle. But what was being kind of silently transmitted to me, which I believe it was a sort of Buddha's sense of transmission, some other kind of knowledge, some other kind of deeper understanding. Lama Kongo took my hand and just said, be patient with yourself. I mean, it sounds, you could say that to anybody. Say it to your own kid, be patient. But this was a special moment of having his hands touched mine.
And it's just like, you just feel like this, you know, you got your bell rung. Suddenly, something deep inside in me responded to that. But there was a lot of that during that time. Even as I mentioned, seeing Leonard Cohen and Oakland, You know, ring the bell that still will ring. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack in everything. That's what lets the light in. That second line, forget your perfect offering. Saying, there's no such thing as perfect. Offer
That's all you need. And that must have been such a big transition for you because you were, you know, one of those kind of higher achiever types. You're always good at stuff, good at football, good at school, good at your career. And then the rug gets pulled out from under you. I bet that was part of this huge transition was like, OK, this driving, I
have to quit with this driving. Does that resonate with you or am I projecting onto It reminds me of the story a couple of years ago when the Seahawks up here lost their second Super Bowl here in Seattle against the dreaded New England Patriots. And it was Pete Carroll, the coach, presumably, he took the ownership for a bad call. Now, whether he really made the call or whether it was the quarterback that blew it, Russell Wilson, but the
whole town is just doom and gloom. Everyone's just devastated. It's the last second and they blow it big time. It was just like massive depression. And I think in the press the next morning, He's so chipper and so into players. His quote to the press was, you know, I'm made for moments like this. We're going to rebuild. I'm the perfect guy for this. And I think in a way, under my circumstances and the things that unfolded around me, I was the perfect guy to have this happen.
Even if I'm just the audience of me, myself and I, there was a symmetry to it. There was a certain kind of stroke of fate. And I have that feeling with clients and almost everybody else on the planet. It's these moments of desperation, these moments of great action, of tragedy, of loss. These are the things that temper our souls. And not everybody is resilient, not everybody rebounds, but as they say, it's not the trauma, it's the response to the trauma. So
in time, we learn how to weather those things. And sometimes in a couple of weeks, couple of months, sometimes a long time down the road, when we can reframe what has happened to us in a different kind of narrative, it's a healing process, but it takes an enormous amount of patience and what I call in the book, it's a form of spiritual maturity to have that kind of patience to wait to see what comes to you, not what you think you're going to go out and pluck the apple with your own
good luck. It's going to somehow drop and roll to your feet. Okay, and you're into Zen, and do you believe in karma? Do you think that you chose this life on some certain level? Like, where do you land on all those kinds Well, I heard the Dalai Lama once, and the question from the audience was, is there So, I think I want to put this, whether I quote, believe it or not, seems more like a cognitive operation, so to speak. Okay. On a deeper intuitive level, there's something else
there I would call ineffable. I don't know. I mean, it's like UFOs. Do I know they exist? I don't know. What is karma anyway? I mean, there's a hundred different definitions. Which one do I believe in or not? But I'm more suspicious of orthodoxy and whether it's a religion or a spiritual group or politics, when people are not only, what was the Mark Twain saying? Nothing is worse than somebody
who's right and somebody who's damn right. So people who are so riveted, and again, a Zen Buddhist notion that when we cling to our ideas or we cling to an emotion, that's the source of our suffering. So if I cling to an idea about my political righteousness, it's going to bring nothing but heartache and trouble. If I can learn to let go of it and kind of go, you know what, maybe there's something else.
I mean, even for the things I think politically I have really strong feelings about, the longer I perseverate around it, the more I'm in the grip of it and I'm lost. So that's an adjustment we all have to learn to make, I think, is how do I, despite how my political emotions go up and down almost daily, how do I release and still live the life I can live in knowing that some things I can't change? So that's a certain kind of equanimity, I
think. It takes time, I think, to become grounded in that kind of practice of patience. But more important, it's not just being patient, it's also being an alert to what life is trying to reveal to you. So in the case of me getting fired, or some of the other happy events, as well as some of the other difficult ones, what was life trying
to reveal to me by that? talk about any of that in your life. I mean, whether as an adoptee, I mean, or you are in a state of perpetual yearning to find a birth parent, or you don't even care because your life is happy, you don't even need to know. I mean, fine. If
nothing is bothering you, then proceed. But if things are out there, sometimes there are those little signs that inform us, I think, about something else behind the veil, something else we need to, like in dream work, that sometimes the monster and We can, through practice as a therapist, learn to get closer to that image, learn to be able to withstand just enough and make it stop just enough, and then allow it to be able to
see what is lying behind that. Now, my training would tell me that oftentimes we find the ally we didn't know we needed is behind that. But that can come true in people we have conflict with or circumstances where you think, well, getting fired sucks, but it's like, well, what else is revealing itself to you through this? But It's clear in the book and just talking with you that that pivotal moment, which seemed like the worst possible thing, was possibly
a gift. I don't know. Is that offensive to say that? Not that you should be grateful or anything, but that Without that horrible event happening, your life would have just kept humming along at that same level, When I was told to grab my stuff, leave my computer and which, by the way, they spent $10,000 going through all of my records, found nothing on my computer. Oh, my God. As I left the building, I called my wife and said, I'm coming home. What happened? I go, I
said, just have about five gin and tonics lined up, that'll be fine. But there was a little voice that went off in my head, given the people I've been struggling with, it's like, oh, thank God I'm out of this. I could have done it a better way. I mean, I could have applied to a job the year before and a neighboring district didn't. But see, that's ego. That's like, I can be better than this. I can beat them at their own game. That's ego
talking. But while I put in the book from James Hillman talking about Plato's Republic, the idea that, have I designed this myself? The idea there out of Plato is that there's a myth he recounts that before we're born, we have this chance to sort of choose all the circumstances of our own life, our parents, the jobs, the friends, the
lives, the deaths, all the other complications that come in our life. And so we've chosen all that, like an obstacle course that we've designed for ourselves that we need to run in order to get the learning we think we really need. The good and bad news is just before we begin that, then we forget everything. We don't know we did it. But I do that sometimes with
clients when they find themselves in a real pickle, really stuck. You know, lots of really crappy, terrible people, horrible circumstances, what a mess. And I kind of say, just imagine, you don't have to believe it, let's just play with the imagination. What if you had designed this? Both of you were responsible for the mess you're in today. If that was true, then to what end? This
isn't a blame game. It's like, what else were you thinking? What else was part of your design that you needed to get through this obstacle course or this labyrinth that you needed to have happen? Including being stuck. The experience of being stuck is a pretty good place to be, I think, a lot of times in therapy and life. We didn't feel like it at the moment, It feels terrible, but you have to go through that and get through to the other side somehow. Wow. Yeah, that's an interesting
thought experiment. Whether you believe in that or not, it's an interesting thought experiment. Like, why did I choose this? What am I supposed to be learning here? Yeah, you have to rely on just give yourself a pass and say, this is just an imaginal exercise. But then a lot of the concepts, a lot of the precepts of therapy in the area of psychology I'm in and others is that it's all imaginary. What's ego? Well, we all think we know what it is, but it's not a
thing. It's an imaginary element. We can define it. We can put names to it. We can have diagrams of it. But it's not really a, for that matter, soul is something that we can only know through much more deeper, intuitive, or even spiritual way of understanding that is not read like a book. does not come with an instruction kit
and say, read this and you'll understand because... Now, most books will tell you that's the way it is, but most books probably understandably, myself included, err in the direction of trying to make something intelligible and understandable, which is necessary. But that raw primary experience, I think, with these really deep dynamics of being human, we need to understand them in multiple levels. Carl Jung talked about before his typology. We have a thinking function, a feeling function,
an intuitive function, and the last is sensation. And so for me, thinking and intuition are really strong. The other two are not so strong. Some people that are really good with their hands, for example, super strong. with sensation and sometimes weak some other place. There's no good or bad to it. Ironically, at least my belief, and I've heard this repeated many times, that in terms of our own lives, that when we can identify what I know. Oh my gosh, that's painful. You can't default
to your brain or to your deep intuition. You have to default to something where you feel, oh yeah, in that world I'm at klutz. If something breaks at home, my first thing is, honey, But on the other hand, there are other examples where that physical sensation part is also his own form of ally. I mean, in terms of how I learned to cultivate that, so to speak. Not that I've become a piano player or a woodworker, but there are other things that reveal
Yes, I get that because I'm a drummer now. I do taiko drumming and the physicality of it is incredible. Plus you hear it too, but it literally vibrates your whole body. That's pretty amazing. Well, you seem so at home in this realm of kind of spirituality and psychology and therapy. Is there a part of you that wishes you had started here and skipped the whole school Well, you know, kind of like the old saw that, you know, sometimes you have to kiss a
thousand frogs before you find the one you want. So, yeah, but it's a great question because this issue, which we haven't talked about, but it's a big highway down the book was the belief in vision for schools. It's still a big deal for Yes. I loved your ideas about school. I hated school. It I mean, schools that work for kids that are liberating, but we're still stuck hopelessly stuck in 19th century models, and
it drives me insane. And there are schools out there that are doing something different. But this is the nature of establishment, school board establishment, school You know, there are places and times where they're pretty cool. But largely, if you go into West Des Moines High School, and go into Burlington High School, or go into Buick High School, I dare say that you could spend a half a day in each of those places and you go, Well,
the mascots are different. The colors are different. They're different sized Same stuff. It hasn't budged for a long time. Well, thank you for your work on all of that. And I know you did move the needle forward on all of those progressive ideas with school. And I know you're helping a lot of people now, and your book will help a lot of people. Thank you for speaking out as an adoptee and kind
of bringing adoption into this too. I figured a lot of educators will read your book and a lot of therapists will read your book and maybe some of them don't even know anything about adoption, but now they will through your book. So that's a lot of really interesting intersections. Well, is there anything else that I didn't ask you that you would like to talk about that I I will say what you said about yourself and me growing up in the Midwest, growing up, in my case, in the 50s and early
60s. When I was 15, the day before my 15th birthday was the day the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan for the first time. Nice. But I recounted the beginning of the book, going to the Chicago Stockyards with my grandfather, seeing Ernie Banks, the great Ernie Banks playing at Wrigley Field, seeing slums and black urban life for the first time, which was an eye opener. Those were all seminal things that I think grounded me, particularly, I think, having grandparents
who were farmers. They were a small town, but they passed away by the time I was of much age. But I spent time with them, and that was not only a gift of who they were, but it was also a little bit of a bridge back to the agrarian 19th century of the Midwest. And you can see that, you know, my dad and aunt dropped their ponies and down the road two miles to go to school when they were young and then they had to move into town to
go to high school. But I think there's something about that deeply inbred common sense and I think respect. It was just natural. It wasn't taught. It was just sort of the way what was modeled was this innate respect for other people, particularly people from less desirable circumstances. I think that story's in the book. I've forgotten about When I was about 10, a big farmer guy showed up at our door, our big house, where my dad was a surgeon. We
had a nice big house. I was the only one home and this big hulking guy comes up. And I looked out the door and thought, Jesus, big muddy boots and hair all over the place and greasy ball cap. And what's in off the dad's home? And I go, no, because I realized, I said, don't even open the door if it's a stranger. It's like I already had the door, but he's going to push his way in. You know, I got something for your dad and pulls
this huge box of vegetables. He goes, you know, your dad, uh, A couple months ago, when I had penicillitis, you know, he took that thing out and he knew I wasn't doing too well and I had other bills to pay. He didn't charge me a nickel. That's who your dad is. So these are for him. You tell him, old Jim from down near Weaver, that's down south of Burlington. He said, you tell him where I was there and to thank him for that. And I was like, you just don't get over stuff like that. You just don't
Oh, very good. Well, tell Iowa hi. I don't go back there anywhere where there might be snow, but I suppose you're safe nowadays, now this time of year. Well, thank you so much. And if people wanted to get a hold of you or hire you as a therapist, how would they go about Well, my website is my name, Stephen, with a PH, stephenroley108.com. And on that, all my contact information, a lot more information about my book. And there's
all these other podcasts. You'll be there someday. And then other articles I've written about issues around adoption, mental health, and children, stuff Okay, I'll definitely put your website in the notes. So everyone, you can find the show notes, just either scroll down or sometimes you have to swipe. If you're on a phone, swipe to the left, I guess, to find the show notes and you can find all this information. And your book is called The Lost Coin, A Memoir of Adoption and Destiny. So
I'll put a link to the book too. So everybody go check that out. Thank you so much, Steve, for being with us today. I really enjoy getting to And if you'd like to connect deeper with Unraveling Adoption, find us at unravelingadoption.com. You'll find information there about the coaching services I provide and also about our upcoming book coming out very soon called Adoption and Suicidality. If you are interested in getting on the book launch team for that, hop into the show notes and there's
a link for you to join that. Thank you all for listening. Please make sure and share this episode that helps us get the word out about our podcast. We really appreciate all your support and Steve and I want